Last Room

by Reah, Danuta

  Will evaded him and walked towards the station frontage. There was an open square crowded with taxis, mostly old and battered, touting for business. People pushed past him wearing backpacks or dragging suitcases behind them. It was easy enough to meld with the crowd and let it carry him into the ticket hall, a high, spacious area that was neither indoors nor outdoors, a transit space between the street and the tracks. Huge boards showed arrival and departure times, and people queued at a long wooden counter where the ticket windows were placed. This kind of thing was second nature to him. He positioned himself by a notice board and observed the people flowing in and out of the hall.

  He could see no sign of surveillance. Everyone seemed to know where they were going and what they were doing. There was no one showing undue interest in their newspaper, or studying timetables for overlong. He joined a queue at one of the ticket windows and after a few minutes, he was as certain as he could be that no one had followed him.

  He collected a timetable and left the station. A few streets away he found the place he was looking for, the Internetowa Kawiarnia Spadochronowa: the Skydiving Internet Café.

  He had no idea what the link with skydiving was, but the interior of the café had been decorated to create a hi-tech feel, with tinny metallic finishes contrasting oddly with spilt coffee and cigarette butts in the ashtrays. In the middle of the room, a model helicopter took pride of place. Will paid for computer time and took his coffee across to the tables where monitors faced away from each other. There was only one other person using the equipment.

  He was about to log on to Facebook, then stopped. The Walter Gilman page was in itself a dead end. He needed more information. He stared into space, trying to remember. Who was the writer of the story? Who was Brown Jenkin’s creator? He typed ‘H.P. Lovecraft’ into the search engine, and found it at once: Dreams in the Witch House. With an odd reluctance, he clicked on a link that gave him the text.

  He drank coffee while he skimmed it, making a note of the names of the important characters as he went. He’d read it years ago but he’d never liked it. It had always struck him as both trashy and distasteful, an opinion he’d made clear to the teenage Ania at the height of her enthusiasm.

  A re-acquaintance with the text did nothing to improve his opinion. It was a piece of lurid pulp writing about nameless horrors and arcane mysteries, but what made it so disturbing was the sense of something truly evil that permeated the text. It was carried by the figure of Brown Jenkin, the familiar of the witch Keziah Mason. Brown Jenkin was a rat-like creature with a small, bearded, human face and human hands. The witch light of its presence flickered and glowed from the places it haunted. Will hated the idea of this thing personifying the depressions that had eaten away at Ania’s mind. It seemed obscene that even as a metaphor she should talk about having it in her head.

  He shook the images away and logged on to Facebook. He had hoped that his response to the e-mail might have signalled to someone else, someone Ania had contacted who might have been waiting for him, but there was nothing there. There had been no activity on his James Pearson account, other than that generated by the site itself.

  He began searching the site for the names Keziah Mason and Brown Jenkin, but found nothing that fitted. He read through the text again more closely this time. In the story, Walter Gilman had tried to protect a small child the witch had kidnapped and was about to sacrifice. He had managed to drive off the witch, but not Brown Jenkin, who had killed the boy. The child’s name was Ladislas Wolejko.

  Louisa in the park, playing by herself on the swings. It was twilight, and as he watched, a sickly phosphorescence began to glow in the dimness. Louisa swung, slower and slower, her feet brushing the ground. Stay high, he wanted to warn her. Don’t come down. Don’t walk away through those shadows alone in the evening playground. Then she was standing there, barely visible in the darkness and the bushes behind her rustled as though something small and rat-like was creeping towards her.

  Hardly breathing, he typed the name Ladislas Wolejko into the search box.

  There was nothing.

  He stared at the screen in frustration.

  Then a number appeared at the bottom right of the page: 1. Next to it, there was an icon with the words “Online Friends.” It was a moment before he understood the significance. The site was telling him that one of James Pearson’s friends was now online. James Pearson had no friends, except for…

  Holding his breath, he clicked the icon. A note popped up. Walter Gilman is not available to chat.

  The screen went blank. Will blinked, back in the sci-fi fantasy of the café. The waiter came over to apologise. ‘The connection,’ he said. ‘It drops off sometimes. I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, it’s OK. I’d finished. Thank you.’ He stayed in his seat, feeling as though he had been punched in the gut. He knew the Facebook page was from Ania. She was the only person who knew the significance of the bear, and of the name, Walter Gilman. Someone else had accessed that account. Someone else had taken over the Walter Gilman persona. Everything Will knew about the site, this person now knew as well. Small Bear has a secret. What secret? Where?

  He paid for his coffee and his time online, and took a tram back to Piotrkowska. As the tram clanged its way along the street, he saw a fair haired woman walking with a brisk, familiar step along the pavement. As the tram went past, she raised her hand in a salute.

  Chapter 33

  It was getting colder now as the day began to fade. Will wanted to get into shelter, but he had somewhere to go before he went back to his hotel. The streets were coming alive with night-time crowds as he stepped off the tram into the evening. The street lights cast a yellow glow and the air had the bite of winter. He pulled his scarf more closely round his neck.

  Five minutes brisk walking brought him back to the university. It looked as though most students had left but there were still some stragglers on the steps standing round in groups smoking, laughing and talking.

  There were lights on here and there in the building. This was a place where people routinely worked late so it wouldn’t be a problem to gain access. He checked his notebook quickly and went up the steps past the students who moved apart politely to let him through.

  The lobby was empty, a space of grey shadows in the twilight. The stairway opened up in front of him, the steps gleaming faintly in the last of the evening light. The stairs down to the car park were in shadow. Will could hear his footsteps echoing as he walked across the flagged floor to the small reception booth.

  It was empty, but he could hear someone moving in the cubbyhole behind the counter. He rapped on the wood and after a moment, Jerzy Pawlak emerged. ‘Yes? Oh, it’s you. You said nine.’

  ‘I was passing. Can you talk now?’

  ‘I’m working. I don’t have time for this.’ Suddenly he was angry. ‘I’m sorry about your daughter, but what do you think it was like for me? I found her. The police…’ He broke off and looked at Will. His face was sullen.

  ‘You saw her from the window. Did you go down to the car park?’

  ‘Of course I did. I wanted to see if there was anything I could do.’

  Will looked away. He wanted to disengage from Pawlak’s distress. He should be sorry the man had had such a traumatic experience, but he didn’t have the time or the energy to let it concern him. ‘According to the statement you gave the police, you spoke to her in the computer room at around nine.’

  ‘I asked her to lock up and she said she would.’

  ‘What was she doing?’

  ‘Working.’

  ‘But what was she actually doing?.’

  ‘Working on the computer.’

  ‘What was on the screen?’

  ‘Why would I look?’

  Will told himself Pawlak was not being deliberately obstructive. ‘Was she the last person in the building that night?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘No one came in after I locked up. It’s
not my job to search the place. Is that all? I need to get on.’

  It would have been easy enough for anyone to have hidden somewhere in the maze of rooms and corridors. All the entrances were well observed from Pawlak’s station, but anyone could have come into the building earlier and waited.

  ‘A couple more things. You told the police you thought Ania had left. What made you think that?’

  ‘I heard her. She came down the stairs and left by the basement door. I heard it close.’

  This was new. This wasn’t in the police statement. ‘You heard her?’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘But you didn’t see her?’

  ‘I was doing my rounds. I was along the second corridor. I heard her on the stairs, so I went downstairs to make sure the basement door was locked. I do my job properly.’

  ‘What time? What time was it you heard her?’

  ‘I start my round on the hour. So eleven thirty? Something like that.’

  ‘And you told the police this?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’ Sullen.

  ‘Describe it, the sound you heard.’

  ‘Someone on the stairs. What do you want me to say?’

  ‘Like this?’ Will picked up a pen and made a staccato rapping sound on the wood, the brisk tap of high heels. ‘Or this?’ This time he used the side of his fist: pad pad pad, a man’s footsteps.

  Pawlak shrugged. ‘Footsteps. I heard footsteps.’

  He wouldn’t say any more.

  Chapter 34

  Back in his room, Will took stock. Despite his precautions, someone had found the Facebook site. And now there was something else: footsteps on the stairs… Someone had come down those stairs that night, someone who hadn’t gone up them, not after Pawlak came on duty. Someone had been concealed in the building and knew when the security guard would be making his rounds, someone who had slipped out of the basement exit because there was something he needed to check in the car park, something he needed to do… Whoever that person was, he knew the university well.

  It had been in the police report: …key to the room door in the left hand pocket.

  Maybe that had been her last moment, the feel of the key being slipped into her pocket, knowing that her death would be written off as the suicide of a guilty woman…

  He trod hard on the emotion welling up inside him. He didn’t know what to do. Pawlak claimed he ‘didn’t know’ if he had told the police about the person he had heard on the stairs, the person he’d assumed was Ania. There had been nothing in the police records, or nothing Will had seen. Did that mean Pawlak hadn’t told them? Was he lying now to get Will off his back? Or had Król concealed the evidence?

  There was no reason he could think of for Król to ignore it. He would want the death to be suicide because that meant less work for a force that must be over-stretched. The fact the fingerprint on the phone hadn’t been followed up was a mark of the kind of sloppy work that happened when a force was undermanned and overworked, but evidence of someone else in the building – no police officer could dismiss that. He made a note to contact Król, and went back to his notes. He read through his list of unanswered questions again:

  1. Did she tamper with the recording?

  2. Why?

  3. Why wasn’t the substitution noticed in the first investigation?

  4. Why did she run away?

  Why had she done it? Why had she tampered with the recording? If he could answer that, he would know where to start looking.

  Konstantin Jankowski had implied she was trying to find something that would clear her name, but that didn’t ring true to Will. If she hadn’t tampered with that tape, if she was innocent of that accusation, she would have sat tight and relied on the expertise of her colleagues to prove it.

  He was slowly and reluctantly prepared to accept that she had done it, because he was beginning to see that she might have had a reason.

  She, Louisa and Elžbieta had been the only people in the park the morning Louisa was abducted. Elžbieta had been in the café and had seen nothing in the crucial thirty minutes. The police had assumed that Louisa had left the playground and encountered her abductor elsewhere in the park. But no one knew until now that it had been Ania who had left, and she might, just might, have seen something, something that held no significance for a child. But later, as an adult, with the growing realisation of what her concealment might have done – a small childhood fib with consequences far beyond anything she could have conceived – she must have relived that crucial period of time, that half hour that had changed all their lives, over and over again.

  When the photograph of the man helping police with their enquiries appeared in the papers, what had that face meant to her? Had she recognised him but known there was no way she could prove it after all these years, that it wasn’t enough? Had she found her sister’s killer? Or believed she had found her sister’s killer.

  If I can do something to stop someone like that…

  He picked up the phone and dialled the number of Ian Cathcart’s direct line. It was after six in the UK, but he might just catch him. Cathcart answered at once. ‘Cathcart.’

  ‘DCI Cathcart, it’s Will Gillen.’

  ‘Mr Gillen. How are you?’

  ‘I’m OK. I’m in Poland dealing with – that’s not important. I need some information about Derek Haynes, about the investigation.’

  There was a beat of silence, then Cathcart said, ‘What did you want to know, sir?’

  ‘Remind me – when did Haynes emigrate?’

  ‘Hang on. I’ll check.’ He heard the sound of a keyboard, then Cathcart came back. ‘1986. Autumn 1986.’

  1986. Louisa had died that summer. ‘OK. I need to know – you’re re-investigating. Is there any evidence to suggest the killer might not have been Haynes, that it was someone else?’

  There was a pause as Cathcart worked out his response. Will waited with growing impatience. ‘Nothing.’

  He released the breath he didn’t realise he had been holding. ‘Are you looking at any other cases of child abduction in relation to Haynes?’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘I’m talking about the Louisa Gillen abduction in 1986. I’m talking about my daughter.’

  After a moment, Cathcart’s voice came back. ‘Yes, sir. I know. We didn’t realise that Ania was…’

  ‘She didn’t want you to. That was why she changed her name. She started using her mother’s name because she was dogged by the case everywhere she went.’

  ‘They’re going over several earlier cases. I understand your daughter’s is one of them. I should have… I’m very sorry, sir.’

  He should have known. Someone should have told him. Even Blaise had kept him in the dark. He knew they had found nothing. If they’d found the smallest thing, he would have been informed. But the one person who might have been able to give evidence against Haynes, the person who might have seen him in the park that day, was dead.

  ‘Thank you, Inspector.’ He put the phone down.

  When the Haynes case started, she’d had only her childhood memories, an identification that wouldn’t begin to stand up in court. What she had done wasn’t about revenge. If she had recognised him, then she knew she was facing a dangerous, predatory paedophile who had killed at least once before. She’d done what she had to to get him off the streets but she must have known that her evidence could be challenged at any time.

  Louisa and Ania had been in the playground while Elžbieta had a cup of coffee in the park café. When she returned to find the girls, Ania was swinging on the monkey bars alone.

  There was no sign of Louisa.

  Her body had been found four days later, stuffed into one of the pipes that channelled the river through the city. She had been raped and strangled.

  Like Sagal. Same modus operandi.

  The story of Sagal Akindès’s disappearance had never quite made it to the front pages, not until her body had been found and the photographs had s
urfaced on the internet. Then the story gathered momentum. Photographs of Derek Haynes, the man helping police with their enquiries started to appear, first as a blurred figure between two police officers being escorted into the police HQ, then clearer pictures passed on by colleagues and acquaintances, stories about Haynes being a loner, being quiet, being seen in the road watching the children on the local sports field.

  Derek Haynes was 50. He would have been 28 when Louisa was murdered.

  He could have done it.

  It could have been him.

  What Ania had done – it had been a holding operation, a way of making things safe until she could… until she could come up with the evidence that would keep Haynes locked away for good.

  That was why Ania had to stay out of custody – there was something more she had to find and she hadn’t, not yet. She’d been aware that the police might already be watching her so she alerted him to its existence via the Facebook link…

  He forced himself to stop. He was building a house of cards. He had to stay with the evidence. She had no reason to conceal her search from the police. They would have been as eager as she was to link Haynes with any previous killing. If there had been anything, she would have shared it with them.

  He played with the idea that Haynes himself was behind this, that he somehow had a reach outside of prison and that was why Ania had run. But if Haynes had that kind of reach, he would have been able to protect himself in prison, protect himself from prison in the first place.

  But there was someone else, someone he hadn’t considered.

  He thought for a moment, then added a question to his list:

  Whose voice was it on the original recording and where is he now?

  Chapter 35

  Dariusz got back to his flat after midnight. He spent the early part of the evening working, talking to someone who had information about a man – a very wealthy and powerful man – who had apparently bribed a government minister to amend a bill that might damage his media empire. Dariusz was trying to persuade the informant it would be safe to become a witness for the prosecution.